Friday, 10 October 2014

c:\hello world

Welcome to my new blog site and thanks for coming here.

Suffice to say, I killed QRP/SWL Homebuilder for good reasons — I’ll only write about what happened after that.

After we switched if off, >100 emails appeared within 30 hours. Builders wrote stuff like ‘thanks’, ‘what the hell?’ and ‘oh no!’ Some even offered to send funds, or to host the web pages. Gosh, I suddenly heard from people from 5 continents who followed the site for years but never emailed.

Certain emails hit me hard with statements like “this is wholly unsatisfactory” or “you can’t stop now, I just discovered the site 3 days ago”. I felt sick and in an act of contrition, swiftly set a goal: after multiple emails and many hours on Skype, Stuart [the computer science engineer who kept the QRP server going] and I archived most of my site into a single pdf file — you’ll find it linked on the Old Site page but hosted by nobles.

More than ever before, I felt the power of a splendent community rising up in joy and generosity. Thank you for this experience.

The Blog Site

I’m quick to dismiss the ersatz blogger: but nod to those who share solid, fresh content — and — don’t just post fluff to keep their blog site appearing continuously in others blog lists. Amid the transfer trauma, I put up Popcorn QRP as yet another experiment — who knows, I might suck at this?

My goals:

foster creative partnerships

gather wisdom

feel inspired by others work

celebrate the joy of bench experiments

boost my test and measurement skills

Writing on Blogger offers many perks. For example:

no ISP bandwidth grief

0 server hardware/software headaches

automatic feeds so people don’t have to check for new content and waste their time

more appealing to “the youngsters” who love social media and new gadgets

offers an arena to test ideas and elicit comments about my experiments

easy translation

Thus, a blog-site feels like a positive step forward for me. Further, I hope to offer some of my better stuff as complete experiments/projects in more coherent pdf files and ask others to host them.

I also feel excited to help Mikey, WB8ICN write some of the technical content for The Five Watter — a printed quarterly published by the Michigan QRP Club.
When published/posted, I'll announce this stuff on my blog and add it to the My Articles page.

On here, I offer only 1 very amateur perspective and you’re always the best person to help you advance on your bench. You won’t see posts that often and I prefer to stay in the background — experiments, photos and schematics (good or bad) shall crash the foreground.

I experiment from October to May only and sadly, all this fuss kept me off the bench. And so, I lack lots of new content to post [ but that's easily fixed ]. Enough writing — it's time to dust off my bench tools and learn something.

Big thanks to all the bloggers/friends and sages who helped me get to this point — you all rock!